


Old Boots

by JoJo



Category: Alias Smith and Jones
Genre: Community: smallfandomfest, Episode: s01e12 The Fifth Victim, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:14:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28752000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoJo/pseuds/JoJo
Summary: A close call has left them both out of sorts
Relationships: Hannibal Heyes | Joshua Smith/Jed "Kid" Curry | Thaddeus Jones
Comments: 14
Kudos: 20





	Old Boots

**Author's Note:**

> written for DW's smallfandomfest to the prompt "too tough to die"

When the stage rolled to a stop it was late afternoon on a windblown street the color of donkey hide. They were six hours out of the depot and the stage was traveling on.

Hannibal Heyes blinked out through the window. As far as he recalled, the driver would be switching out the team here. Also as far as he recalled, a joint decision about whether they’d keep going in this bone-rattler, or stay over to refresh, would be made only once he and Kid Curry had stretched their legs. 

The Kid, however, seemed to have his own ideas. 

He’d slapped the side of Heyes’ thigh with the back of his hand almost before the stage door was open. It was a bossy, decisive, slap. Curry was up, slipping past Heyes and down the steps in a moment. He shouted up to the driver for the bags. 

“Stayin’ over?” came the answering shout.

“Yep.” 

When the two battered saddle-bags flumped to earth, Kid Curry leaned in the open door, offered Heyes his arm. 

This did not seem a whole lot like a joint decision.

“What’s going on?”

“We’re stopping here, Heyes. No arguments.”

Heyes’ hackles rose, despite his headache. 

“Are you serious?”

“C’mon and give me your hand. You’ve looked ready to pass out for the last two hours and the road ain’t going to get any easier. Time to rest.”

“We can rest at the end at the last stop. We said we’d get as far from that town back there as we could, fast as we could. I’m thinking we should just keep going.”

“Heyes,” Kid Curry said, “Just climb on down right now, or I swear I’m coming in to drag you out.”

Any other time, in any other circumstances, Hannibal Heyes would have fought him on it. He didn’t like being told what to do by anyone, least of all Jedediah Curry in a powerfully dogged state of mind, for their history was as thorny as it was steadfast. There was almost nothing the two of them fell into more easily than a disputation (apart, that was, from anything resembling a bed). But truth was, right now Heyes felt too downright lousy to go nose to nose with the boy Jed, not in any sense. 

Head wounds would do that to a man, for sure, and the doc back at the Carlsons’ place had told him he wouldn’t feel right for a while. That he needed to go real easy for a few weeks.

Taking it all into account, Heyes didn’t give Kid Curry any opportunity to do as he’d threatened, but grudgingly waved the white flag instead. 

When he made it to level ground, the Kid’s gloved hand stubbornly gripped in his, Heyes guessed he’d made the right call. His limbs were all a-tremble and it didn’t need anyone telling him he’d turned a nasty color to match because his roiling belly did the job just fine. That morning’s bullish ‘you worry about staying on your horse and I’ll worry about staying on mine’ no longer seemed to fit the situation.

“Where are we?” he managed to mumble. Kid Curry had both saddlebags over one shoulder and was guiding him along with the occasional touch on the small of his back.

“Don’t matter. Tucson, Timbuktoo. Wherever it is we’re gonna stay a spell, get you rested up.”

Well it certainly wasn’t Tucson. 

As for Timbuktoo, it was some weeks before Heyes was near spirited enough to ask his partner where on earth he’d gotten _that_ notion from, and if he even knew where it was.

*

Rolled up in an extra blanket that night – because he had the permanently chilled bones of a gunshot convalescent – Heyes dreamed the rifle at the back of his head. He also dreamed a mountain cat called Helen, and a deck that was always a little short. Mostly, though, he came back to the rifle, discharging with depressing regularity into the dark at the back of his head.

“Where were you when I was shot, Kid?” he kept asking in the dream, a tad desperate.

And, “Behind you,” Kid Curry always answered, reasonable, and entirely without emotion.

Heyes woke from the latest repetition with a jerk. Bathed in an unpleasant cold sweat, he was convinced for a few seconds that the Marshal was at the door, come to arrest Kid Curry for murder.

Beside him on his belly, arms crossed under the pillow, the murdering Kid Curry apparently slept the sleep of a righteous man who’s been all day on a stagecoach. 

Heyes let out a long, quiet, breath. 

Course Kid Curry was sleeping. Never mind the journey, the Kid had been working his shapely backside off for days trying to uncover the identity of a shooter who’d taken out four men and nearly a fifth. He’d been putting in familiar hours on horseback, and unfamiliar hours chewing everything over. Hannibal Heyes would like to think he’d have solved the case quicker than his partner, but he couldn’t be sure. Since almost dying he couldn’t be sure about a whole lot of things.

“Don’t fret, son,” the doc had said to him. “Something like this may give your confidence a knock for a while.”

Heyes didn’t like not being confident. And he didn’t like Kid Curry with a face like granite.

After ruminating on this for a moment, Heyes untangled himself from the extra blanket. He slipped from the bed, and crossed to the washstand to splash his face. A small shiver rattled his spine.

“You all right?” came a sleepy voice. “Head hurting?”

“Just getting some water,” Heyes murmured in reply.

“Come on back to bed.” 

Heyes took a quick drink, then stepped carefully across the room. When he was settled under the covers again, Curry shuffled in, bedsprings groaning.

“Fevered?”

“Nope.”

“Cold?”

“I’m fine, Kid, stop worrying.”

“Humph.” 

“Was thinking though.”

Curry yawned discouragingly at that, although he nudged the side of Heyes’ shoulder with a splayed elbow.

“Yep,” Heyes went on. “Was thinking what a fine job you did with that detective work of yours back there. All on your lonesome.”

“Sure as hell did.”

“And that you’re due some reward.”

“Sure as hell am. Now shut your mouth and get some rest.” 

Heyes grimaced into the dark. Did his partner expect him to come right out and say how proud he was? Would it take that to get a smile out of him?

No matter, Heyes’ hands and feet were warming. In fact, he was pretty much starting to feel himself like a righteous man who’s been on a stagecoach all day. And, what’s more, that there was nothing else he’d rather do than go right on to sleep.

“’Night,” he whispered, but Kid Curry had gone before him.

*

There were no more dreams, not that night. 

Heyes slept right through breakfast. He slept most of the way through lunch, too, and surfaced to find Kid Curry sitting across the room from the bed, cleaning his gun. This, as usual, was both a comfort and a worry. It was what Curry did to relax, but it often also betokened violence, and Heyes had really had enough of violence to last him the rest of his life. 

The Kid was shaved and dressed, had on a pale gray shirt under his tan cord vest. Judging by his boots and the sheepskin slung over the chair at his back, and by the fact that he was a man who didn’t like to miss breakfast, he looked as if he’d been out already. He also looked grimly focused on the job in hand.

Truth to tell, ever since Heyes had woken up – woken up from being shot off his horse in the dark, that was – Kid Curry had seemed grimly focused on more or less everything.

For a man who presented so straightforward and easy, Curry sure had a vein of steel running through him at times. It was a striation Heyes didn’t always appreciate, for it tended to the stubborn and could make his sweet-natured partner gloomy as a graveyard. Had to admit it had saved his skin more than once, however. 

He cleared his throat. At once his sweet-natured partner flicked a brief and slightly vague look in his direction before going back to the gun, the rag, the brush, and the oil.

“Hey,” Heyes said.

“Nothing to be awake for, you should carry on sleeping.”

“And a fine good morning to you too.”

“Well it was,” Kid Curry said, looking up again. He seemed to see Heyes clearly this time and frowned. “You need more rest.”

“No, no.” Heyes struggled to sitting. Except for some obvious exceptions he downright hated being in bed when he was conscious. “Think I’ll take a stroll around outside – seeing as you insisted we stay in this darn windblown burg. Maybe get some victuals.”

Kid Curry regarded him for a moment. Then there was a slide of metal into leather.

“Maybe I’ll join you.”

So they went down the street from the hotel, walking shoulder to shoulder in the feeble sunshine. They ate steak and beans in the saloon, with Kid Curry wolfing down a goodly serving of apple cobbler with his beer. Heyes enjoyed the steak – felt his body needed it – but he remained on coffee and water.

“Good to see you eating something that ain’t slop,” the Kid observed, rattling the spoon into his empty cobbler dish. “Thought you might drown in all that broth Miz Carlson fed you.” 

“She looked after me real well.”

“Yup, right from the time I carried you through the door.” Kid Curry sucked his teeth. “She sure was glad when you finally decided to wake up.”

Heyes supposed that was true, but figured that Curry wasn’t actually talking about Rachel Carlson. He pursed his lips, half unwilling to revisit that part of the affair. The whole sorry, strange, disorienting time of coming in and out of his own consciousness. Of shadow-boxing with reality. Of opening his eyes after what seemed like years. And being shocked by his partner’s suspiciously deadpan face.

“There was something going on in that head of yours,” he couldn’t help saying now, voice almost catching. “You thought I was going to die, didn’t you?” 

“Nope, Heyes.” Curry seemed very sure, answered right away. “Never thought that.”

“Ha,” Heyes said, recovering his composure. “Reckoned I was too tough, huh?” 

A snort, but then Curry’s eyes lifted from his beer, nailed Heyes across the wood. His voice was tired, his gaze a blue infinity. That steely determination was showing through again, although layered over something rather less tangible. He spoke slowly. 

“You certainly ain’t too tough to die, Heyes.” 

Heyes, faintly outraged in spite of himself, began to bluster out a “Well, I like that!”, but the Kid cut right across him.

“Not too tough, Heyes,” he repeated, deadly serious. 

“What then?” 

Curry’s eyes were pretty as ever, but they still bored into Heyes, hurt his heart and set it skittering. 

“Too important,” the Kid clipped out. Then he picked up the glass and tipped the remains of the beer down his throat in one. 

Pulse still at a canter, Heyes watched him replace the empty glass on the table soundlessly, then slowly wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. Kid Curry rose to his feet, briefly flexed his hand and then touched the heel to the gun at his hip, a tic of which he was mostly unaware.

The mouth, the hand, the hip. Heyes felt a flush heat his face. It wasn’t fever either. More like a hellish unseemly desire that lit his bones for a moment before settling.

“Oh, that,” he said.

“Yes, Heyes, that.”

When Kid Curry rounded the table to give Heyes assistance out of the chair, hand warm and sure, he at last gave him a smile. It wasn’t yet one of his sunniest, but there was promise enough there. 

Heyes reckoned he’d bank it. Cash it when he had his confidence back. When he had the strength to roll Kid Curry flat on his back and kiss all that steel and stubborn right out of him.

-ends-


End file.
